Manage Meeting Madness (The Monthly BTH, March 2024)
Where’s your meeting bloat and how can you reduce it?
We’re kicking off a new experiment with monthly themes. Each month, we’ll be focusing on one of the eight team habits from my book, Team Habits: How Small Actions Lead to Extraordinary Results.
Why Are We Focusing on Team Meeting Habits?
Meetings are a go-to for me and my ilk, but I don’t highlight them merely because of people’s intense feelings about them. (Though that would be reason enough.)
As I say in Team Habits, meetings are such a linchpin team habit because:
They’re the context in which all other team habits come into play.
“Meetings are one of those places where, in the span of an hour, you see all your bad team habits one after the other in rapid succession.”
Often they’re placeholders for the other types of work not getting done. Don’t have clear objectives? Hold a meeting. Are teammates not communicating effectively? Hold a meeting. And so on.
They’re costly because they displace other value-driven work we could be doing. This is particularly true if they’re done poorly. And let’s face it, the ratio of good meetings to mediocre-or-worse meetings isn’t good for a lot of us.
So that’s why this month we’re highlighting some of the key takeaways from the Team Habits chapter on meetings (chapter 9), as well as some other resources to help you and your team navigate this team habit more effectively.
But Why This Month?
Now that we’re past some of the early-year thrash — returning from the holidays, objectives and goal-setting, maybe performance appraisals, and all those other beginning-of-the-year activities — we’re finally getting into the groove in March.
And, for many people, the end of the first quarter of the year looms and it’s not looking so good. Their team is already behind, so enter the “let’s have meetings to figure out what’s going on” cycle. Enter the crutch meetings and, sometimes worse, daily stand-up meetings.
So before the meeting madness kicks off in earnest, it’s a good time to make sure meetings are really the place to start.
If you’re like a lot of organizations I’ve worked with, you’ve acquired a lot of meeting bloat in the first couple months of the year, as you and your team figured out objectives, created plans, and did other strategic work you needed to finish ahead of the more tactical, “get stuff done” phase. Yes, those things are important, and they may also have led to additional meetings that are clogging up your and your team’s calendars — meetings you no longer need that are getting in the way of the important work you all need to be doing.
Not sure if you’re experiencing meeting bloat?
Next week, I’m going to share a post that’ll help you see the real math behind meetings, but instead of starting with math, let’s start with purpose.
What’s the Real Purpose of Your Scheduled Meetings?
Here’s your task: for every pre-scheduled team meeting on your calendar over the course of the next week, ask yourself what concrete or specific purpose each meeting has.
Yes, I love bonding meetings AND “we get to see each other and see what everyone’s working on” is a standard and true response when I ask the job of most team meetings. Team belonging habits get an easy pass, but let’s unpack the “see what everyone’s working on” part of the statement.
What does seeing what everyone’s working on get you that’s worth the team’s time and anxiety about what’s not happening while they’re at the meeting?
Here are a few better ways to flesh out the purpose of the meeting:
The meeting will help us coordinate our marketing efforts
The meeting will help us prioritize sales efforts
The meeting will help us solve the executive issues that have come up over the last three weeks” are all good jobs of the meeting
With that clear purpose in mind, you can evaluate whether the meetings are actually advancing their intended purpose.
If they are, how can they do that better? If they’re not, what needs to be shifted so that they do?
Per the usual, don’t let the simplicity of the practice fool you into thinking it’s not worth doing. The 15-minute review of your schedule could save you a few weaksauce hours in meetings.
If you really want to engage with this practice, ask your teammates to secretly write down what they think the purpose of your shared meetings is, and then have everyone share their answers.
If your answers are similar and aligned, great. You can build on that.
If your answers aren’t similar and aligned, great. You can address that.
But I beg of you, don’t schedule another separate meeting to do this. Repurpose the updates section from a scheduled meeting instead.
Remember that subtraction can often be the best way to fix a problem and bloat.
Other Meeting Resources
Team Habits Sample Chapter 9
Read This Before Our Next Meeting, Al Pittampalli
Death by Meeting, Patrick Lencioni
No Fail Meetings, Michael Hyatt
Meetings Worksheets for Premium Subscribers
For paid subscribers, I have two additional worksheets to help with determining your meeting load and thinking about how you might reduce it: the “Why Am I at This Meeting?” worksheet, and the Meeting Template worksheet.
Upgrade your subscription to paid in order to access those worksheets below.
Paid subscribers also have access to our upcoming Monthly Office Hours call on March 13, 2024, 11am PT — the place for support for you and your team to improve your habits and work better together.
If you’d like even more support aligning your objectives with team actions, upgrade your subscription to Pro and get access to our 2024 Quarterly Planning sessions. Our next one is March 20, 11am PT.